We are all impressed by quotations. A common conventional approach to writing an essay used to be to start with a quotation from Dr Johnson — still is with some people — which apparently assured the reader that the writer was a learned scholar, portly and balding, with half-moon spectacles slipping down his nose. If not Dr Johnson, then Oscar Wilde, or, if one really wanted to show off one’s superior intellect, with one from Henry James, a dependable source for quotations resonating with intimidating authority.
Quotations from the famous dead add authority to the expression of our ideas. The assertion of a personal belief that might appear eccentric is less in danger of being repudiated when it is preceded or followed by a quotation from an authoritative figure whose ideas are universally accepted. In any debate, our argument is rendered more persuasive by quotations from famous sources. And in journalism an important criterion that makes a story credible is that it contains quotations, which can be confirmed to be true, attributed to the journalist’s sources or statements taken from witnesses.
Quotations in newspaper stories can also lend an aura of incontestable truth to what may only be someone’s opinion, and therefore of questionable truth. Not long ago, there was a story in The Guardian about the discovery of some unknown poems by Pablo Neruda in which the reporter quoted Gabriel García Márquez as saying that Neruda was the greatest poet of the 20th century. Now most readers, even of The Guardian, know little, if any, of Neruda’s work, but to be quoted that pronouncement by the universally revered Márquez must make them assume that it must be true, and thus the myth about Neruda’s supreme greatness is taken for granted. Well, for those who happen to know something about 20th century Spanish poetry, there is the small matter of the extraordinary work of Federico García Lorca, Antonio Machado, and César Vallejo. Of course, no one denies Neruda is a fine poet, but the greatest? In any case, such attribution is meaningless; literature is not a league table in which the poets are ranked. My complaint here is not against Márquez, who might have made his pronouncement in some context which might render his assertion reasonable, but against the journalist for using a quotation as if it confirms an undisputed truth, a statement that leads ignorant readers to believe an untruth to be an inarguable fact.
For an essayist, quotations provide a solid support for the advancement of problematic ideas or sometimes suggest the terms of discussion in which to lay out one’s thought — as when, leafing through a previously read book one is struck by lines one had marked and is stimulated to explore an idea.
I pause there, having just pulled out Selected Letters of Charles Baudelaire (translated by Rosemary Lloyd) from the shelf and become absorbed in some passages marked when I first read the book: “But I’m determined always to do what I want — at least where literature is concerned.” (Jan 9, 1856). “You know I have never considered literature and the arts as pursuing a goal at odds with morality, and that beauty in their conception and their style is all I demand.” (July 9, 1857). “… my eternal thesis: the goal of moral teaching is goodness, that of learning is truth, but poetry and sometimes the novel have beauty as their unique goal. Any man who cannot devote his faculties to these corresponding goals is neither a philosopher nor an artist … ” (8 Jan 1859). “One day you’ll come to admire perfection alone and you’ll scorn all these outpourings of ignorance.” (Feb 18, 1860).
In an age in which one’s contemporaries place a premium on subject-matter as if their ideal text resembled an investigative journalist’s report, it is reassuring to hear an undisputed great poet expressing his central credo that he is beholden to no current trend but pursues his own obsession with transforming the substance of his experience into an aesthetically pleasing form. Even as I reread the lines marked in Baudelaire’s letters, quotations from other writers stating the same ideas come to my mind. I next pick out Wallace Stevens’s The Necessary Angel, and find marked there, “I might be expected to speak of the social, that is to say sociological or political, obligation of the poet. He has none.” And to those who think literature needs to address current socio-political problems, Stevens answers, “Nothing in the world is deader than yesterday’s political (or realistic) poetry.” Other modern and ancient poets have dismissed social-minded concerned relevance, their obsession has been with perfection of form to attain that elusive phantom, beauty, which obsessed Baudelaire, and is echoed by Stevens saying in a letter, “My object is to write [a]esthetically valid poetry”.
Well, let me not begin to sound like the writer who flaunts brilliantly minted quotations in his essay like a military officer who covers his chest with decorations and medals in a pompous display to show off what in his self-conceit he presumes is his high distinction. So, dropping the Baudelaire and Stevens books into a box to be shipped to the ICPWE, I see a bright vision in my mind, a young Pakistani opening one of these books years from now and, being so impressed by the lines marked in it, becomes filled with the ambition to be a great writer creating unsurpassed beauty in his chosen language.
Zulfikar Ghose is a poet, novelist and literary critic. His novels include the trilogy The Incredible Brazilian, and The Murder of Aziz Khan which launched Pakistani fiction in English when first published in London 50 years ago. He is Professor Emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin.